{art} – Page 298 – { feuilleton }

More Songs for the Witch Woman

This month I’ve been enjoying the latest quality publication from Fulgur, Songs for the Witch Woman, the centrepiece of which is a cover-to-cover reproduction of the book of occult poetry and art created by Jack Parsons and Marjorie Cameron in the early 1950s. It’s been a great pleasure in recent years seeing the welling of interest in Cameron’s work. In 2001 when I was compiling notes for an abandoned study of occult cinema, Cameron as artist, witch or mere human being was a shadowy presence about whom nothing substantial seemed to have been written; her art was impossible to see anywhere, all one had were fleeting references in books, and her appearances in The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome and Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide, a pair of films that only exaggerated her mystique. The intervening years have seen a lifting of successive veils so we’re now able to watch Curtis Harrington’s film portrait, The Wormwood Star, and see her work in books and exhibitions like this one (also titled Songs for the Witch Woman) which will be showing at the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles from mid-October. As an early precursor to that there’s this feature by Robert Garrova at SPRC which includes comments about the exhibition from organisers Scott Hobbs and Yael Lipschutz.

Pan: art by Cameron, poem by Parsons.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Songs for the Witch Woman
• More Cameron
• Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome: The Eldorado Edition
• The Wormwood Star
• Street Fair, 1959
• House of Harrington
• Curtis Harrington, 1926–2007
• The art of Cameron, 1922–1995

Du Tac au Tac: Druillet, Hogarth and Buscema

I thought I was done with Druillet for this week but no, there’s more. I hadn’t come across Du Tac au Tac before, a French TV show from the early 70s in which three (sometimes four) different comic artists are given a total of 15 minutes to improvise a drawing on a single board. The list of contributors is a who’s who of comic talent from France, Belgium, America and elsewhere. French TV site Ina.fr (which is pay-to-view) has 130 episodes in their archive, many of which have found their way onto YouTube. Druillet was a regular contributor, as was Moebius.

I’ve singled out this episode from 1972 for the astonishing conjunction of Druillet with Burne Hogarth, two artists with a considerable influence on my own comics work. Without the example of Heavy Metal magazine in general, and Druillet in particular, I might not have bothered trying to adapt Lovecraft’s stories into comics in the 1980s; at one point I was prepared to put together a book of stories-plus-illustrations along the lines of Berni Wrightson’s Frankenstein. Burne Hogarth, meanwhile, casts a Tarzan-shaped shadow over the darker shadows of the Reverbstorm series, his work being quoted throughout, especially in the appropriation of the bizarre and sinister Ononoes from the Tarzan Sunday strips. The third artist present, John Buscema, is notable if only for representing the comics creation that I like the least: the over-muscled, flat-groined, stupidly-costumed, always-fighting, corporate superhero. As it is, Buscema doesn’t fare too well in this exchange, sketching a half-hearted Silver Surfer while Hogarth (who was left-handed; don’t think I knew that) draws a profile of Tarzan in pastels, and Druillet works furiously with markers to create a typical melange of bat-winged demon, alien glyph and screaming head. I’ve not watched any of the other episodes yet but for those interested there are two channels of the things here and here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Sorcerer: Druillet and Friedkin
• Ô Sidarta: a film about Philippe Druillet
• Lovecraft: Démons et Merveilles
• Heavy Metal, October 1979: the Lovecraft special
• Philippe Druillet album covers
• Druillet’s vampires
• Salammbô illustrated
• Druillet meets Hodgson

Ô Sidarta: a film about Philippe Druillet

“Qualité très médiocre,” says the uploader of this 10-minute film by Michel Jakar about French comic artist Phillipe Druillet but that’s okay with me when we’re given an opportunity to see Druillet at work in 1974. (Ô Sidarta, as Druillet-heads will tell you, is the name of Lone Sloane’s spaceship.) Jakar captured the saturnine artist on 35mm (!), accompanied by a buzzing electronic score from Alain Pierre; the drawing we see Druillet creating was later used on a poster when the film was being shown around festivals. Cut into the shots of the artist at work are pages and panels from the Lone Sloane story, Délirius (1973), and a later album, Yragaël (1974). Most fascinating for me was seeing Druillet flinging the ink and paint around at speed. This makes sense given the huge volume of pages he was producing in the 1970s, all of them crawling with detail and shading, but it’s still good to have suspicions confirmed.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Lovecraft: Démons et Merveilles
• Heavy Metal, October 1979: the Lovecraft special
• Philippe Druillet album covers
• Druillet’s vampires
• Salammbô illustrated
• Druillet meets Hodgson

Lovecraft: Démons et Merveilles

UK publisher Titan Books announced earlier this year that they’d be reprinting the first volume of Glénat’s excellent comic-strip adaptation of Michael Moorcock’s Elric novels in an English edition, a book that should be out in September. This was a surprise to me when I’ve complained for years that Titan seldom showed any interest at all in Continental comics, despite France and Belgium being over-burdened by world-class creators. I’ve been surprised again this week by the news that Titan will also be reprinting the English edition of Philippe Druillet’s The Six Journeys of Lone Sloane in March next year. Druillet’s books have been unavailable in English editions for decades so this is good news indeed, even if the attention is scandalously late.

As I noted in the post about Glénat’s Elric, Druillet illustrated Moorcock’s albino anti-hero in 1973. The artist is better known for his Lovecraftian depictions, however, even when—as in the adventures of Lone Sloane—the story could easily sustain itself without all those sinister temples, fish people, Cyclopean architecture and the menace of nameless gods. The Lovecraft influence, which can be found in some of his earliest illustrations, comes to the fore in Lovecraft: Démons et Merveilles, an HP Lovecraft story collection published in an expensive limited edition by Éditions Opta/André Sauret in 1976. Druillet provided ten colour illustrations plus a design for the boards. Some of these illustrations have since been used on paperback editions of Lovecraft in France, although many of them crop the artwork. Tentacles have become a perennial cliché in Lovecraftian art (I should know, I’ve drawn enough of them) so it’s worth noting how few there are in Druillet’s drawings.